Phantom Members of the Independence Party

WARNING: If you find accounts of the perpetual feuding within the Independence Party to be boring and incomprehensible, do not read any further.

The state Independence Party organization has taken the unusual step of forming a three-member panel (sound familiar?) to investigate the party’s county organizations and see if their rosters contain phantom party members. (This, according to IP member Frank Morano, who is perhaps best known in NY political circles for an ostensibly earnest effort to draft Lindsay Lohan into politics.)

State party rules require a certain number of active members to be on a county organization’s committee in order for it to have the power to endorse candidates and function autonomously. Morano said that he and others suspect some organizations have on their committees people who never asked to be there, people who moved out of state and others who are ineligible to serve.

The members of this new panel include Tom Connolly, who chairs the Rensselaer County organization, state party secretary Bill Bogart and Morano.

All three are loyalists of state chairman, Frank MacKay, who is in a protracted fight with Lenora Fulani and others in the party.

For those of you who could benefit from a quick review: MacKay says that Fulani is a racist and her followers are under the spell of a cult led by pseudo-psychologist Fred Newman, while Fulani and her people say that MacKay is a racist and a pawn of the Democratic and Republican Parties.